This initiative has been on the sidelines since last year, waiting for the new congress to do something re illegal immigrant legislation. Now that it is clear that illegal immigrant legislation is toast for the current congressional session at least, DHS is safe in taking their enforcement program out of mothballs ...
(snip)"U.S. Set for a Crackdown on Illegal Hiring
By JULIA PRESTON
Published: August 8, 2007
In a new effort to crack down on illegal immigrants, federal authorities are expected to announce tough rules this week that would require employers to fire workers who use false Social Security numbers.
Officials said the rules would be backed up by stepped-up raids on workplaces across the country that employ illegal immigrants.
After first proposing the rules last year, Department of Homeland Security officials said they held off finishing them to await the outcome of the debate in Congress over a sweeping immigration bill. That measure, which was supported by President Bush, died in the Senate in June.
Now administration officials are signaling that they intend to clamp down on employers of illegal immigrants even without a new immigration law to offer legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the workforce. "(snip)
(snip)"Experts said the new rules represented a major tightening of the immigration enforcement system, in which employers for decades have paid little attention to notices, known as no-match letters, from the Social Security Administration advising that workers’ names and numbers did not match the agency’s records.
Illegal workers often provide employers with false Social Security numbers to qualify for a job.
Employers, especially in agriculture and low-wage industries, said they were deeply worried about the new rules, which could force them to lay off thousands of immigrant workers. More than 70 percent of farmworkers in the fields of the United States are illegal immigrants, according to estimates by growers’ associations.
“Across the employer community people are scared, confused, holding their breath,” said Craig Regelbrugge, co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, a trade organization. “Given what we know about the demographics of our labor force, since we are approaching peak season, people are particularly on edge.”
The expected regulations would give employers a fixed period, perhaps up to 90 days, to resolve any discrepancies between identity information provided by their workers and the records of the Social Security Administration. If workers’ documents cannot be verified, employers would be required to fire them or risk up to $10,000 in fines for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. "(snip)
(snip)" Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for Social Security, said the agency expected to send out about 140,000 no-match letters to employers this year, covering more than eight million workers. After the rules are announced, the agency is anticipating a surge in requests from employers seeking to clarify workers’ information, Mr. Hinkle said.
Social Security issues letters only to employers who have more than 10 workers whose numbers do not match, when those workers represent at least one-half of 1 percent of the company’s workforce, Mr. Hinkle said. "(snip)
(snip)" Even large companies that do not hire many low-skilled immigrants would be affected by the rules, lawyers said.
“It’s going to be a big change for almost every company,” said Cynthia J. Lange, an immigration lawyer in California.
Muzaffar A. Chishti, a director of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, said, “If this is strictly enforced there could be massive layoffs of workers.” But Mr. Chishti said that illegal immigrant workers might not leave the labor force but would apply for jobs at other businesses using the same invalid documents. He predicted the market for forged documents would grow. "(snip)
The obvious question of course will be what happens to those US businesses that employ low skill workers if they must actually verify the worker's legal status and actually pay that worker the minimum wage ? What happens to the prices of food and other items currently produced using sub-minimum wage illegal labor if the business must raise their sale prices enough to cover minimum wage plus mandated benefits for legal employees ?
Here's one example that is 'close to home'
(snip)"Crackdown on aliens has farmers worried about crops
The arrests last week of 34 illegal aliens who were picking crops at a tomato farm in western New York State has farmers in that region worried about whether the millions of bushels of apples, peaches, pears and other produce now ripening in their fields and orchards will all get picked this year.
They're so concerned, The Buffalo News reported today, that "most won't even talk about the issue for fear they'll be the next to have their workers checked."
"All farmers are worried about that," Tim Bigham, a New York Farm Bureau associate field adviser, told the newspaper. "Despite claims otherwise, I'm pretty sure names go on lists. It seems that way."
Apple farmer Darrel Oakes told the News that farmers have no choice but to accept the workers' papers -- Social Security and green cards -- as genuine because they have no effective way of checking the documents on their own. But if immigration agents later discover the workers are in the country illegally, the produce pickers may disappear. "We're between a rock and a hard place," Oakes said.
Apples alone are a huge industry in the Empire State. The News reports that the 770 farms that belong to New York Apple Growers produce more than 25 million bushels annually and that 99% of the apples are harvested by migrant workers."(snip)
It would appear that if the US food / agriculture industry cannot count on being able to employ illegal workers at sub-minimum wage, either the prices charged for US agricultural and food products must skyrocket to cover the labor costs of minimum wage plus mandatory benefits, OR we'll increase our imports of lower cost agricultural and food products from other countries eventually putting much of the US agricultural and food product sector out of business (as well as creating permanent unemployment for most of the workers, legal or illegal).




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